Seaside Spectres

From the mountains to the sea, North Carolina's 100 counties have a wealth of creepy stories to tell. These three volumes present a ghostly tale from each county. Though folklore fans may recognize a few new twists on old favorites, the great majority of the stories have not previously been told in print.Seaside Spectres offers tales from 33 counties in eastern North Carolina. "Betty" tells about a Lenoir County orphan who consoles himself over the loss of his parents by imagining that people in heaven are given white horses to ride to visit loved ones -- a fantasy that proves more real than he could have imagined. "The Fraternity of Death" tells of a society of sacrilegious freethinkers in New Hanover County who begin to die mysteriously after they stage a mocking imitation of the Last Supper; it is a true-life tale that may have inspired a Robert Louis Stevenson story.Piedmont Phantoms includes 39 counties from the state's populous middle section. In "The Incident at Settle's Bridge, " readers will meet Tilda Carter, who was convicted of murder and hanged, whose lifeless body was kept overnight on a Rockingham County covered bridge during bad weather, and whose ghost later haunted that picturesque site. In "The Hunter at the Zoo, " they'll encounter the spirit of the Confederate recruiter who once hunted human prey where the North Carolina Zoological Park now stands in Randolph County.Haints of the Hills features 28 counties in North Carolina's mountainous west. If you walk the right road in Avery County, you might meet the ghost of seven-foot-tall Revolutionary War hero Robert Sevier, as related in "The Long Trek Home." If you climb the right mountain in Macon County, you'llreach the former stomping ground of the notorious witch Old Nance, as told in "Mile-High Witch."